Thursday, November 3, 2011

November 3, 2011---love grass

This is almost too complicated to explain (especially after a long day), but here goes. This morning, on my walk, I encountered all sorts of pretty things that wound up in the windowsill.

From the walk, came the hickory leaves (second from right) and the grasses (third from right). More on those later. Also in these vases are (far left) a late-blooming red rose with parsley stolen from yesterday's arrangement, black berries of liriope (second from left), which I noticed as I was walking up the driveway, and the core of a green pepper (third from left), which was leftover from one I diced for breakfast and couldn't seem to throw away because its form was so interesting.

On far right is tobasco bottle, which I really enjoyed playing with. In it is a parsley stem (with leaves removed; I used the leaves with the green pepper in a sweet potato hash-browny thing). Combined with the parsley stem (sans leaves) is a red pepper, which the bottle seemed to call for. Sounds easy, but to attach the red pepper to the pepper bottle turned out to be a challenge, since the neck of a tobasco bottle is so narrow (the better to keep you from putting too much hot stuff on anything!). The parsley stem had almost completely filled the opening, so I had to use a narrow grass stem, skewered through the pepper, and jimmy that, not the pepper stem, into the bottle.

But none of that was the visual event of the day (a perfectly beautiful one, by the way). The visual event of the day was related to the purple love grass in a field next to the Solite factory on my morning walk. When morning dew settles on purple love grass (Eragrostis spectablis), it looks like a cloud has settled onto the field. This particular grass has wire-thin stems and tiny, tiny seeds that all sort of flop over into masses of nothingness that manage to hold dew in a way seems to define "delicately ephemeral." I wish I had a picture of it in the landscape to share.

The relevant thing here is that I brought one lovegrass stem home just because I couldn't resist holding it in my hand. I knew it wouldn't show up in an arrangement, because it's just too tiny. But when I was putting some other, bigger grasses in the third bottle from the right, I stuffed my lovegrass in there, too, just because I had it. What happened next still thrills me (which is probably, after a long day, why I still have the energy to describe this). I was trying to photograph the gleanings from my morning walk, etc. in the windowsill when I noticed the stems in the bottom of one vase were gleaming.

Wow. There were tiny little bubbles of air all around the purple lovegrass stems. I have no idea why this happens, but I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the way purple lovegrass stems hold dew in the morning, too.

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